Saturday, May 30, 2009

Joan Rivers Puts a Big Number on Her Penthouse

SELLER: Joan Rivers
LOCATION: East 62nd Street, New York, NY
PRICE: $25,000,000
SIZE: 5,190 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: ...The Penthouse boasts a suite of superb reception rooms, a dramatic 2-story Gallery & light-flooded Living Room with original architectural detail painstakingly restored by museum-trained artisans. These rooms are distinguished by soaring 23’ high ceilings, exquisite original boiserie, elegant parquet-de-Versailles flooring and original marble fireplace surrounds. A spacious corner paneled Library and well-proportioned Formal Dining Room featuring 18th century French panels overlook a sunny, south-facing terrace with majestic views of the city and Central Park....

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama loves us some Joan Rivers with her potty mouth, scathing humor and a face that looks like Madame. So when we heard from New York Ned and then read in the New York Times that the sassy septuagenarian had listed her Upper East Side doo-plex penthouse we just about peed our pants.

It should come as no surprise that the ballsy and brassy Miz Rivers–who is, let's be honest, thisclose to becoming a clownish caricature of herself in the same plastic surgery vein as Cher and Michael "The White Lady" Jackson–listed her 5,190 square foot penthouse on swank East 62nd Street with a ballsy, brassy and blistering $25,000,000.

Property records are a bit wacky on this one, but as best as we can tell from the people at Property Shark is that Miz Rivers purchased the 3 bedroom and 4.5 penthouse condominium in 1988 for an unknown amount of money but an amount that we would bet our long bodied bitches Linda and Beverly was a fraction of the current asking price.

Listing information reveals Miz Rivers' residence sits atop a 42-foot wide limestone mansion built in 1903 by noted architect Horace Trumbauer in "the neo-French Classic style" for a ladee named Alice Troth Drexel who had married into the famous Drexel banking family of Philadelphia. Sometime later the once grand house was chopped up into 12 condominiums, at least some of which still feature original details.

Miz River's aerie, according to listing information, includes a "dramatic" gallery and living room with 23-foot ceilings, parquet de Versailles flooring, original fireplace surrounds, and original boiserie which is really a nice gay decorator word for carved paneling. Miz Rivers has had a Fort Knox worth of gilding done in the main reception room and in the larger of the two, which looks like the sort of place in which Marie Antoinette might feel comfortable, the ceiling has been painted like a clouded sky. Your Mama wonders if a system of fiber optic lighting hoo-has turns that blue day sky into a dark night sky with twinkling stars just like the ceiling does at that horrid mall at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

The dining room has much lower ceilings than the reception rooms, but is no less ornate with it's 18th century mirrored panels and gilded details. We're sort of surprised to even see a dining room in Miz Rivers' residence because we thought the crass comedian had stopped eating about 100 years ago and instead just injects herself with a combination of nutrients, Restylane and formaldehyde.

The library, with its wonderfully wacky Cheetah print carpeting includes more paneling, another original marble fireplace mantel, built in book shelves with actual books–say what you will about Miz Rivers' but at least the beehwatcha reads–and a giant dark caramel colored tufted sofa where she probably sat and watched herself on the boob-toob while she won the most recent season of that deplorable Donald Trump's Apprentice.

The dining room opens to a tiled and planted terrace which is a lovely feature but does anyone really imagine that Miz Rivers actually sits out there? She's really not a creature made for being out of doors unless it's to dash from the back of a car to the front door of a building. She's not a vampire, of course, but certainly the sun would quickly shrivel and melt the ol' gurl in 2 minutes or less.

The New York Times reported that Miz Rivers wants to sell her penthouse of old-school Upper East Side opulence in order to move to California to be closer to her daughter Melissa, who lives in Los Angeles and is the surgified spitting image of her mother.

Other showbizzy residents of Miz Rivers' building include film producer Alan Ladd Jr. and Tessa Kennedy who is the mother of actor Cary Elwes and film agent Cassian Elwes.

Miz Rivers also owns a country house north of New York City in Litchfield County, Cee-Tee.

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